Whirlwind Tour of the Midwest

A couple of tightly packed days of visiting friends from Carroll’s college days (and even one friend from high school!), and a couple of late nights of driving, but by golly, we’re still on our schedule! When I first plotted it out, I kinda figured the itinerary would just give us a loose guideline, so we wouldn’t forget any of the more obscure places along the way, but it turns out we’ve stuck surprisingly close to it, and now that we’re in the last week, we don’t have a lot of wiggle room left to improvise anyway, so we’re just going with it.

Thanks to the magic of cell phones, we were able to crash a graduation party for someone we had never met, in Owatonna, Minnesota! We had almost given up hope of getting to see Carroll’s college roommate Binner on this trip, due to conflicting schedules, but she happened to be there, literally within sight of the highway as we were driving by, so we made an unscheduled stop, and the kids even got a little trampoline fix out of the deal!

Then we had a few leisurely hours on Lake Minnetonka with Carroll’s high school classmate,Terrell (and husband Greg) before we piled back in the van for our second late night drive in a row, this time to the Ashland, Wisconsin area, where Carroll went to college.

We arrived at Gus and Joy’s house around 11:00 PM, succeeded in arousing them from a sound sleep, and went promptly to bed. Their hospitality was quickly rewarded when at 1:00 AM, Sam threw up in bed, all over their heirloom bedspread! We were very impressed with what gracious hosts they were when they feigned indifference about the bedspread. Little did we realize the diabolical plan they had for exacting their revenge!

After lulling us into complacency with a gourmet breakfast, they suggested a field trip to look for tracks and other signs of wolves, and to see if we could map the location of a wolf with a radio tracking collar, to get a feel for what Gus does with his Northland students. This seemed innocent enough, and fit nicely with Sam’s fascination with wolves, and Robin’s interest in science generally.

So off we drove into the harmless-looking Wisconsin woods. A little way in, Gus stopped and pulled out what he said was an antenna for picking up the signals from wolf tracking collars. The high-pitched whine of the static it emitted sounded suspiciously familiar, but it wasn’t until our next stop that I recognized the sound for what it was; the device was actually a mosquito density detector!

Realizing we had been had, we swatted furiously, kept a stiff upper lip, and bravely studied what Gus said were wolf droppings, though by this point I was pretty sure they were probably mosquito droppings! Either way, it was awe-inspiring to see first hand the evidence that we were sharing the woods with deadly predators!

Back at their house, we had lunch and readied ourselves to move on to our next stop. As we pulled out of the driveway, Carroll and I both found our eyes welling up, and were reminded just how much we treasure our friendship with Gus and Joy.